Use of thin clients with Linux

It would be great if LWN could write an article about the technical and organisational issues
of setting up Linux for use with thin clients.  There are many projects world-wide doing this,
often for schools, and by all accounts there are big savings in both hardware and ease of
administration (admin time is a critical resource in schools and developing countries of
course).  Now that fast PCs and LANs are so cheap, it really makes a huge amount of sense and
Linux provides the flexibility to do this very easily.

I recently set up thin clients on Ubuntu using LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project), and it
was far easier than I expected - a couple of apt-gets, some minor config file edits, and DHCP
setup.  In fact this works so well I'm going to turn a couple of old laptops into Linux thin
clients when they are at home, connected to a fast new Linux PC as the app server (and also my
main desktop PC).

Although this is of greatest relevance to schools, it's also very interesting for business and
home use, in fact anywhere that has some old PCs that are no longer enough to run the latest
Firefox etc.  Some projects I'm aware of are Ubuntu (has done a lot of work on LTSP 5,
includes thin-client server setup in the basic Hardy installer), Edubuntu, K12LTSP (CentOS
based), LTSP and DRBL.